[Clipart] Contributions to the library

Martin Holmes mholmes at uvic.ca
Wed Oct 6 08:46:53 PDT 2004


Hi there,

At 06:01 AM 06/10/2004, you wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>Martin Holmes wrote:
>>We are the UVic Humanities Computing and Media Centre, so if we decide to 
>>contribute them, we can put them in the public domain. The artists were 
>>working under workstudy contracts under which they explicitly 
>>relinquished rights to their work.
>>I will have to run this by my bosses if we decide to contribute them, but 
>>I don't anticipate any problems. The biggest difficulty for us would be 
>>finding the manpower to do the conversions and convert all our metadata 
>>to your system; we might not be able to do that for some time, unfortunately.
>
>that is what i meant: to ensure you check out with your colleagues this, 
>in order to avoid any future problems (PD can not require advertising)

If we do submit them, it will be mainly so that we can offload the work of 
maintaining our site to some degree, and stop having to answer questions 
about usage of them. It would be a political decision, but we are a 
university department, and we also run a spin-off commercial company 
selling our software, so we're quite familiar with intellectual property 
issues. The current restrictions explained on the site date from 1999, when 
we used to sell the clipart package as part of a CD containing other 
software; we could remove them at will, but we prefer to protect our server 
from the load of people "sucking down" the whole site, and protect 
ourselves from requests to supply the whole archive, just for our own 
convenience.

>about the conversion: i hope this can be automated (see the message from 
>Ted) and we can avoid such problems.

So do I! That would be the only practical way for us to do it at the moment.

>another possible problem will be the addition of metadata, but i hope we 
>can learn more about that from the experience of Christian (Uraeus) in 
>adding metadata to his flag collection.

Our items are associated with keyword lists in a JavaScript array that 
looks like this:

Lookup[14] = 
'animals/bear/bear-v;,animals,bear,mammal,dangerous,grizzly,canada,';

The first bit is the path to the graphic (-v means vector, and there's an 
extra bit added automatically depending on whether you want the matted or 
transparent version). The rest is a list of keywords that we identified as 
useful for language teachers; they're not derived from any standard scheme. 
It would be easy enough to write an application to search these for matches 
with your own keyword list.

Cheers,
Martin


>>Nicu Buculei wrote:
>>>what is the license of your images? are the authors willing to give them 
>>>as Public Domain?
>>>
>>>i see on your website "You may use GIF images from this library on your 
>>>Website as long as you add an acknowledgement to the UVic Humanities 
>>>Computing and Media Centre and Half-Baked Software somewhere on your site"
>
>--
>nicu
>

______________________________________
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
mholmes at uvic.ca
martin at mholmes.com
mholmes at halfbakedsoftware.com
http://www.mholmes.com
http://web.uvic.ca/hcmc/
http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com




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